Tonight, I Want To Fall In Love With A Stranger

Tonight, I want to fall in love with a stranger.
Don’t ask me why, who or how. Don’t tell me if it is right or wrong, if it is shallow or profound. Just don’t. I understand perfectly well how ludicrous it may sound, but tonight, like any night, I want to fall in love with a stranger.

I don’t want the kind of love where you share everyday experiences, hold hands on busy streets, kiss at a coffee stall or fall asleep in each other’s arms while watching the stars burn for you.

That’s the love of the tremendously fortunate, the ones who’ve found life to be a road lined with rose-petals, rather than the fast track into the abyss that it is. But someday they too will understand me.

Tonight, I want to fall in love with a stranger.

I want to meet him somewhere unremarkable and talk about mundane things, like the weather, food or God.

I don’t want to know where he’s been or where he’s headed. I want to be his now – and only his ‘now.’ I want to tell him how much I hate my job and how much I love standing on rooftops and watching the sunset. I want to tell him about the poem I’ve written last night on how I want to fall in love with a stranger. I want him to know what it means to me. And I want him to be a part of me. I want to write stories about him after our time is up. I want to paint him on the canvas of my mind, I want to sing about him when the night fades. I want to love him completely, for a day, because afterwards we won’t meet again.

There’s no point ruining life’s cherished moments.

Too often we ruin wonderful things by sticking around too long: a party, a friendship, a love, a life. There’s a saturation point. So why waste these things? Why destroy the relationships?

Call me crazy. Say I am giving up love before it has a chance to leave me.

But truthfully, I am not letting love go. Instead I’m keeping it alive the only way I know how: loving a new person every day.

I want to fill one day of their lives, with mine. I want to celebrate them for that day and know for sure that I will never get to love them again. I want to love them ferociously, knowing when it will end, because I define it.

My life has no constant. I can’t live for one person, and one person only. I am ready to challenge the concepts of true love that we take for granted. Life is measured in the moments that have completed us not in the number of people who have.

I won’t be eroded by time; I won’t let it take away the people I’ve come to love the most. I won’t let it usurp a home I’ve sold my soul, to build. Time can’t touch love that is preserved in my memories and time can’t destroy the home of a nomadic soul.

I am the wanderer. I am the seeker. I have not built homes in human beings. Instead, I’ve built it, inside myself and painted the walls with the memories of each person who has touched me. I am free.

Tonight, like all nights, I will fall in love with a stranger.
And I’ll give him all my love.
I am made of bits and pieces of the thousands who’ve reached me.

This doesn’t mean I am traveling alone.
Because inside me, beat all those thousand hearts I fell in love with.